In the 19th century, nostalgia was considered a psychological illness, a consideration that changed with the modern psychology of the 20th century, capable of finding in longing, homesickness, melancholy towards a past that will never return, a positive tool to find elements of existential improvement.
My father told me that between nostalgia and memory he always preferred the latter, because nostalgia was the censorship of memory. I stopped being nostalgic when I reached an age in which nostalgia was fully justified, and I did so to survive a present that, if I had succumbed to what could have been and was not, would have plunged me into a depression of infinite depths.
I have great memories of El Bulli, but I don’t miss it. And the reason is purely vital. Going to El Bulli was a staging in which many of the characters that were part of the play have died. My father, Georgina Regàs, Oriol Nicolau, so many have fallen on the battlefield against the Grim Reaper, that I feel like a standard bearer without an army.
The first time I went to El Bulli was at the end of the eighties and the first thing I thought about was the wonderful madness of Ferrán and Juli for staying in charge of a restaurant lost in a cove and that, unlike their last glorious years when it took you 600 days to find a free table, the diners could be counted, being generous, on the fingers of your hands. To understand its survival, we should recover El Bulli historical figures such as Miquel Horta, a patron and good guy whose generosity is missed in a society that is falling apart like a sand castle. Horta is no longer there, but we must vindicate his role as a cultural, social promoter and, in the case of El Bulli, a gastronomic turning point.
With El Bulli restaurant dead, we have another thing left that Ferràn has tried to explain, not always clearly. I, frankly, do not understand the survival of a restaurant without a menu available to the diner. I was lucky enough to enjoy the gastronomic revolution born in the wonderful mind of a genius by tasting his menus and, with the restaurant closed, I have not returned to Cala Montjoi, where, by the way, my father’s ashes began a long journey. Whether or not I visit ElBulli1846 will depend on whether my brain is willing to face a nostalgia that will win by a landslide over the present.
Ferràn Adrià appeared in the press again last week to present the Madrid Culinary Campus. There was, of course, the excuse that they were going to do it in Madrid because they had not been able to do it in Catalonia. Let them present the evidence and even more so now that an excuse of this magnitude is fashionable to justify a decision that does not need to be justified. In Madrid, the trough of Spain, it is the place where IBEX 35 companies like to invest to support an increasingly centralized state.
Gastronomic memory, like other memories, is not always fair and usually fades with the slow disappearance of its contemporaries. ELBull1846 or elBullifoundation would have been guaranteed longevity a century ago, when everything moved slowly enough to be engraved in people’s memories. But in a world in which everything lasts for an instant, Heraclitus’s phrase comes to mind: “Everything flows, everything changes, nothing remains.” The living memory of El Bulli is in his living legacy. In the hundreds of chefs who passed through his kitchen and consider themselves children of that culinary revolution.
